Stillshadow and her daughters stopped their singing. As they stared at T’Cori, she could read the question in their eyes: could she have known the moment spirit left flesh to climb Great Sky even before the women did? Was that possible?
“Yes,” Stillshadow admitted. “She is right. He is dead.” Stillshadow leaned closer to the corpse, whispered some words.
T’Cori strained to hear but could not. What wondrous thing might Stillshadow be saying? What message would she have this man convey to their gods?
Stillshadow straightened and sighed. “We go to prepare his burial song. Do you wish to come?” she asked the nameless one.
T’Cori shook her head. “I will stay here,” she said.
Stillshadow seemed to consider for a moment, but then nodded and left with Blossom.
The dead man lay slumped on the zebra skin, his half-open eyes staring up into the straw roof. T’Cori gazed at him, curious. So. This was death. This was the first dead man she had ever seen. It didn’t seem so strange and terrifying. It seemed…peaceful.
Was he going to Great Sky? Could he perhaps take a message for her? No one knew who her parents were. Perhaps they were dead, and atop Great Sky with Father Mountain. Could she whisper in his ear, that he carry a message for her? He would see her parents, and perhaps his own, and many other loved ones: wife, children, brothers and sisters. All would dance, eternally, atop Great Sky.
She wished she was dead.
The straw and branches rustled. A boy eeled under the hut’s edge, skinning his palms against the dirt. She backed up a pace, surprised but not alarmed. “What are you doing here?”
After a moment she recognized and remembered him. This was the small, thin one she had beaten on the Life Tree only days before. He was all knees and elbows and big white teeth. She had enjoyed the energetic way he climbed in futile pursuit.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“My name is Frog Hopping,” he said.
“What do you want?”
“To see Warthog.”
“You should not be here,” she said, but made no move to call for help. By tradition, dream dancers were not supposed to be alone with common boys, but she knew that some of the other girls did not strictly obey the rule. This gap-toothed boy made her heart smile, and that was something she could use at such a time.
He grinned, reaching into the pouch at his waist. “I’ll give you some springbok.” Frog extracted a piece of blackened flesh wrapped in a leaf. In spite of her responsibilities, T’Cori salivated. It was a long time, too long, before the evening meal. She looked back at the door, and then snatched it from him greedily.
His life-flame was warm but not hot, dancing with blues and oranges and strangely bright around his head. The buzz was like a low song, like one of the tunes sung around the eternal fire at dusk, or the song the old women sang before dawn to birth the new sun. She liked him.
“How was it when he died?” Frog asked.
She chewed, bolting the warm meat as if afraid Frog might snatch it back. Antelope was one of her favorites. She could taste the springbok’s frantic running and its fear of death, and savored them both.
“The fire died,” she said. “His breathing stopped.”
“Fire?”
She wolfed the meat down. “Silly,” she said. “We all have num-fire around us, all the time.”
“I have heard of num,” he said. “They say it is a secret of the hunt chiefs. You know about it?”
She nodded.
“Teach me?” he asked eagerly.
“Maybe,” she said. “One day.”
Disappointment flattened his face. She wondered if he would understand, wondered if he felt the sky’s pull as she did.
He squinted at the dead man. “Does it burn all the time?” he asked. “Why doesn’t it burn me? Why can’t I see or feel it?”
“You are only a boy.”
He shrugged, touching the corpse. “He was hot before. He is cooling, just like any animal.”
She split her attention between the meat, the body and this boy. He was a strange one. “All of the light and heat leaves our bodies.”
“Why?”
Should she tell him? Would it not be sharing one of the forbidden mysteries? Still, it was an opportunity to talk with a boy strange enough to catch her interest. His num-fire was similar to that of most boys, except for the flame around his head. It was brighter, sharper, clearer. Interesting.
This was precious—she had little interaction with boys, and had many questions about them. “Our bodies are just husks,” she said, recalling Stillshadow’s teachings. “Our spirit makes them hot. When the spirit leaves, the body cools. The flesh melts from the body into the ground. The flesh goes down and down to Great Mother, who gives the spirit strength to climb Great Sky. There at the top, Father Mountain gives us our new bones.”
“Oh,” Frog said. He peered more closely at the corpse, poking his finger against the cooling flesh. “Can he see?”
“No. His eyes see nothing.”
“Hear?” Frog asked.
“No.”
He tilted his head to the side. “Perhaps he is asleep. Would he awaken if you said the right words or made the right dance?”
That, she had to admit, was a delicious idea. She could almost imagine such a dance. Was it possible? This boy said such strange, tantalizing things. “I believe what Stillshadow told me, and she said he is gone. I believe what I see, and I saw his fire cool. He is gone.”
“How do you do that?” he asked. “How do you see such things?”
“I don’t know. It is something I have always done. But I can tell you what Stillshadow said to us. Would you like to hear it?”
He nodded eagerly.
“Make a picture in your head,” she said.
He closed his eyes. “Yes,” he said, his forehead wrinkling. “I have done it.”
“What is the picture of?”
“Of Uncle Snake,” the boy said, “who married my mother and hunts for my family.”
“Good,” she said. “Now imagine that you are stepping into his body, as if putting on a skin.”
His face tightened and then relaxed, as if he had never had such a thought before. “Yes.”
“See what he sees. Hear what he hears. Feel what he feels.”
The expression on Frog’s face was almost ecstatic. In that moment, T’Cori found this strange, skinny boy beautiful.
Frog’s fingertips probed the dead bhan’s chest and arms. “But he was so strong, grown. He had received his scars, and talismans. If death could come for him…”
“It comes for all of us,” she said.
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“No,” she said. “Are you?”
He puffed his little chest out. “No. I’m not afraid of anything.”
A lie. This one reminded her of Small Raven. Raven did not like to climb high, or take food to the old women when they were sick. This one, like Small Raven, was afraid of death. “Then why should I be?” T’Cori asked.
“You’re a girl,” he said, as if that answered everything. He gazed for a few more breaths and then said, “I’m leaving. Are you going to tell?”
“Not if you don’t,” she said.
“We make a secret?” he asked, and smiled.
“Secret,” she agreed.
He started to wiggle back under the flap, then stopped and looked back. “What is your name?”
Embarrassment and shame flooded over her, and she lowered her head. “I am T’Cori,” she said. I have no name.
The girl expected the usual derision and laughter, but to her surprise, he offered nothing of the like. Instead, the boy gave her that smile again, and in its light she forgot she was in darkness.
“You will have a name one day,” he said. “It will be a good name. I dream these things.” A lie, she thought. Boys had no such dreams. But even his feeble attempt to comfort her she found warming. “But until then,” he said, “I think I will call yo
u Butterfly Spring.”
A sudden flash of delight brightened her vision. “Why?” she asked, although she needed no reason at all.
“Because I only see you and your sisters at Spring Gathering, when the butterflies return.” Another flash of his suddenly enchanting smile, and then he was gone.
In many ways, Frog’s best friend was the orphan Lizard Tongue, the second word pronounced with a tricky click Frog could not always manage because of the gap between his teeth, so that he sometimes pronounced it “Lizard Head.” Lizard was Fire Ant’s age. His parents had been bhan, one of the groups who lived out in the brush, away from the inner bomas. Lizard had been found in a burned and shattered bhan boma and brought to Fire boma, when he’d only had about three springs. Bhan tended to be smaller, slighter, poorer hunters than Ibandi. Some said that they had been created from leftover clay when Great Mother birthed the real people, the Ibandi. Bhan were included in great hunts and encouraged to trade at Spring Gathering but were not true Ibandi—there was little intermarriage.
Lizard never fit in with the older boys. Like Frog, he was not particularly good at wrestling or running. His fingers were nimble at weaving, so even as a boy he spent more time with the girls than the other boys, and because he had no father or uncle to force him to be otherwise, he was left to make his own way.
“The man died,” Frog told Lizard, and shook his head. “I’ve never seen death like that.”
“It’s always the same,” Lizard said. “They grow quiet, and then still.”
“You have seen it?”
Lizard nodded, “I hear them talk,” he said. “They say there will be more death. That Father Mountain is angry that we let the beast-men hunt on His mountain.”
Frog wondered if Lizard was lying. One of the things he liked about Lizard was his ease of storytelling, something most of his fellows lacked. Lizard could not see the faces Frog saw in clouds, but would lie and say he did. Frog liked that.
He turned, startled by a sudden rustling behind them. The girl from the healing hut had followed him. Girls made him feel itchy. The grown men said that one day he would understand, but he couldn’t see why men seemed to do so much of what they did just to please or impress the women. It made no sense. Women were all right, he supposed, but unless they knew healing or good songs and stories, of what real use were they?
Something about the nameless one made Frog think she was lonely. He knew that feeling all too well, and hadn’t the heart to turn her away.
“Who are you?” Lizard Tongue asked.
Frog didn’t know why, but spoke for her. “They call her Butterfly Spring,” he said.
Lizard puffed his chest out. “I am Lizard Tongue, son of Sand Flower and Arrow. Who are your mother and father?”
The nameless girl stared miserably at the ground, as if it took long breaths to muster her strength. Finally she raised her small chin, then thrust it forward aggressively. “Great Earth is my mother. Great Sky is my father.”
That statement took Frog by surprise. He had heard that some of the most powerful witches in the medicine tribe had been sired directly by the divine mountain. Could it be true? “You believe that?”
“Of course I do.”
Six Ibandi hunters ran by, hooting, flexing their arms and pretending to cast spears, hunching and standing in unison. They wore cheetah or lion skins around their shoulders. Dried grass was tied in bunches at their ankles. It rustled with each step, as they shouted their boma songs. They had started doing this as soon as the news came in about the slaughtered bhan, and the feeling was spreading. The younger boys imitated the running dance, play-fighting with one another, challenging, as if smelling something exciting in the air.
A clutch of those boys approached them. “Frog!” they said. “Come, practice spears with us.”
Fire Ant and Scorpion came close enough to whisper. “We hear things. Our hunters have ceremony tonight. It is time to stop talking to the women.” Ant said this with a significant glance at T’Cori. “Time to be a man.”
“Isn’t that the girl who beat you on the tree?” Scorpion said.
“You too,” Frog said, his ears heating.
Lizard was edging closer to the other boys.
“That’s the crazy girl,” Fire Ant said. “Crazy dream dancer. Bhan girl.”
She looked at Frog, expecting him to defend her. He knew what he should do, knew what was right to do, and couldn’t bring himself to do it.
He stepped closer to his brother and brother’s friends. “Crazy girl,” he jeered. “Go away, dream girl. We are men and have no time for you.”
She looked stricken, but he found something inside him taking a dirty joy from her distress. And found, even more, that it was good to be part of a group. And if the only way the others would accept him was by shaming her, then that was all right with him.
“Crazy girl!” he said. “Crazy, ugly girl.”
Tears were starting from her eyes as the boy hooted and took turns with the others calling at her, insulting her, until she ran away.
Lizard shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Child of Great Sky? I could tell a better lie. That’s just a story they tell to babies whose parents throw them away.” Lizard laughed until he was about to fall over. Frog wasn’t sure why, but he fell into it and laughed along, fell into the rhythm of it even as he knew he was being as cruel as cousin Scorpion poisoning a trapped lizard. He watched her short, thin figure as she retreated behind the lean-tos toward the healing hut. Too late, he fully realized he was taking away something fragile and precious he had offered her: friendship.
Frog heard a voice whispering, Go after her, but his feet wouldn’t move. She had humiliated him on the tree not ten days before, and he was taking his revenge now.
He realized that in making her small he had somehow made himself larger. Frog was now safer and more secure, more closely held at the bosom of the tribe.
And Father Mountain help him, it felt good to be with the other boys, not different.
The nameless one hid behind a rock, watching as the others busied themselves. She observed the other children with their fathers and mothers. Their careless joy pricked her heart. Butterfly Spring. For one precious moment, she’d had both a name and a new friend. Then with a peal of boyish laughter, even that sliver of belonging had been wrenched away.
Tears streamed down her face. T’Cori knew she hated the boy as she had never hated anyone else, not even Blossom with her threats, switches, slapping palms and rough voice, or Raven with her sharp tongue and endless anger. She would show these boys, show them all. And one day, when she found the strength, she would join the gods atop Great Sky and leave all of this behind.
The young hunt chiefs, boys proven over time as fine hunters and wrestlers, and chosen in adolescence by the boma fathers to carry on the traditions of the great hunters, kept to themselves as much as the dream dancers did. The most splendid of them was a boy named Owl Hooting—tall, lean, with piercing black eyes and a lion’s stride, two perfect scars emblazoned on each cheek. T’Cori’s face burned whenever he was near.
As Owl passed, sharing easy laughter with his friends, a single bright idea pierced her darkness.
T’Cori sobbed aloud.
“Why are you crying?” he asked, only the second time he had ever spoken to her at all.
“That boy, Frog,” she lied, thrilled that Owl cared. “He said that the hunt chiefs are afraid of the beast-men, would not dare fight them. That they let the boma hunters do their work for them and just tell stories for their meat.”
His friends, strong young hunt chiefs all, stopped and stared. “What?” Their anger warmed her heart.
“And more—he came to me while I was alone in the healing hut. He tried to touch me.”
She could see their eyes grow hot, and almost changed her mind, retracted her words, but her tongue seemed to have developed an evil life of its own.
Owl and his friends stormed off. Frog was still with his companions but sa
w Owl coming from a distance. His eyes went wide, as if he knew that this was trouble coming but didn’t understand why or what to do.
T’Cori watched, delighted and a bit frightened by her own power.
Owl grabbed Frog’s shoulder. He told Frog the things that T’Cori had said, and then asked, “Did you do these things?”
Frog looked as if someone had dunked his head in Fire River. Frightened. Confused. Owl was a head taller than Frog, and in comparison the boy seemed a child. “No! I would never!”
“She said you did. Are you saying that a sacred dream dancer lied?”
Frog’s mouth opened and then closed like a beached fish. He searched for T’Cori and, finding her, seemed to silently beg her for mercy.
She wanted to laugh, but pinched her own arm to keep the tears flowing.
“Come to the wrestling circle,” Owl said. “Father Mountain will reward truth with strength.”
“I will wrestle the nameless one?” Frog asked, confused.
Owl growled contemptuously. “You would like to put hands on a dancer, wouldn’t you? No. I am her champion. You will wrestle with me.”
Once at the broad, dusty circle, the other boys gathered around, fascinated, their fear transformed into eagerness to watch the thrashing.
After all, any one of them might have been punished in such a fashion. There was endless speculation about the hunt chiefs, what they knew or did not know, what they were or were not.
The boys were eager to watch this, and perhaps learn a bit of the hunt chiefs’ magic. T’Cori had seen the young and elder men of Great Sky almost every day of her life, so this was no mystery. Many times had she watched the young men entertaining themselves and each other at wrestling. But she could not remember watching one of them competing against ordinary boma folk.
This was going to be fascinating.
But in the end, it was not.
Frog tried this and that hold, and nothing worked. Owl was too strong, too quick, too skilled. He chuckled with contempt at Frog’s greatest efforts. He threw Frog and ground his face into the dirt, and gave him a thrashing such as T’Cori had never seen.
“She is a dream dancer!” Owl said, his knee tight against the side of Frog’s neck. “She is not for one such as you. You angered Great Mother, and Great Mother sent me to punish you. You will never even speak to her again, do you understand?”
Great Sky Woman Page 9